A leading economist says New Zealand has never had a “proper conversation” about what immigration is for, which is creating uncertainty for both immigrants and businesses in the country.<\/p>\n
Shamubeel Eaqub, from Sense Partners, told\u00a0Checkpoint<\/i>\u00a0that making it easier for workers to come to New Zealand would benefit sectors like health, which were experiencing intense labour shortages, but he cautioned against loosening immigration settings too much in the current economy.<\/p>\n
“New Zealand has long relied on immigration to fill our skills gaps, but it’s not a panacea, because when people come, that also increases demand,” he said.<\/p>\n
While the country was currently dealing with “incredible demand for workers”, Eaqub noted that job advertisements across the business community had begun to fall late last year.<\/p>\n
“That means that I think there’s less urgency to kind of open up the floodgate, per se.”<\/p>\n
His comments came as the country’s new prime minister, after meeting with business leaders in Auckland, said changes to immigration settings in a bid to ease labour shortages, were a definite possibility.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Chris Hipkins visited the Auckland Business Chamber hoping to quell concerns about how his party would tackle issues like inflation and labour shortages.<\/p>\n
Among those meeting with him were Fonterra’s CEO, bank bosses, Auckland Airport bosses and other commerce leaders.<\/p>\n
The chief executives told the new prime minister that staff shortages were their biggest problem as they discussed solutions for the forecast recession.<\/p>\n
“I certainly wouldn’t rule out further changes; the conversation I had with the business community was about getting the balance right,” Hipkins said.<\/p>\n
That balance, he explained, was between changing immigration settings and invigorating local workers across the country.<\/p>\n
But Eaqub told\u00a0Checkpoint<\/i>\u00a0New Zealand had “never had a proper conversation about what immigration’s for”.<\/p>\n “We kind of use it as a political tool to deal with whatever we want to at the time,” he said.<\/p>\n “Currently it happens to be that it’s labour shortages, 10 years ago it was because we wanted population growth and economic growth, and I think it’s really unfair to … use immigrants as these little political chess pieces.<\/p>\n “We need to be a little bit more structured around what we want it for, that would create more certainty – both for the immigrants and for the businesses in New Zealand.”<\/p>\n A leading economist says New Zealand has never had a “proper conversation” about what immigration is for, which is creating uncertainty for both immigrants and businesses in the country. Shamubeel Eaqub, from Sense Partners, told\u00a0Checkpoint\u00a0that making it easier for workers to come to New Zealand would benefit sectors like health, which were experiencing intense labour […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2562,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2561"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2563,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2561\/revisions\/2563"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}SOURCE RNZ<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"